Ruby Cookbook

[Rob Sanheim]

+1 for everything Les said.

Its obvious publishers like the Pragmatics and 37signals "get it", in
that they sell totally unrestricted PDF's. O'Reilly PDFs can be found
easily if you really want to pirate, regardless of the controls they
have on their Safari program.

Trying to lock down pdfs or other electronic versions of books is
about as futile as game publishers trying to place SafeDisc or
similiar protections on their games. All it does is frustrate legit
buyers, as the pirates crack each version within days, if not hours.

If O'Reilly had been offering a combo pack with an unrestricted PDF +
hard copy of the Cookbook, I would've bought it already instead of
hesitating due to the lack of a pdf.

- Rob

 

[John Gabriele]

Actually, we'd love the books to be fewer pages. However, we did a
fair amount of research on fonts, and we worked with readers early on
to see what fonts worked for them. The Bookman we use turned out to
give people the sense of being approachable while still being
readable. Everyone is different of course, and I understand what
you're saying about the width. At the same time, I get a fair number
of e-mails from folks saying they love the layouts.

As an aside (regarding layouts), one amazing thing about the PickAxe
v2 to me is how, all over the place, there's notes that say, "see page
#n". I'm guessing this is done using some LaTeX magic. It's very
impressive and helpful. I lot of other books just say, "see chapter
n, section m".

Regarding Bookman, I will say that although the glyphs are rather
wide, they have nice ... um, "balance" I guess (that is, the
difference between the thickest and thinnest parts of a given glyph
isn't too large), and it's indeed a handsome font. I think David
Black's recent Ruby for Rails book suffers (IMO) from the font glyphs
being too thin in the thin places, which gives the text a kind of
uncomfortable high-contrasty look (great book, by the way).

Every now and then I experiment with changing the fonts around (we
recently changed the code font in all our books to make it narrower)
and I'm still open to suggestions. But approachability is still
important to me, and I wouldn't want to go with anything harsh.

Dave, I just grabbed a sample pdf (exerpt) chapter from your site and
had a look.

1. Whoa! The source code snippets are colorized! The graphics
(including the occasional screenshot) are in color too! And on Ubuntu
using Evince, the text is much more readable and clear than I'd
expected (I'd previously been using xpdf). I will definitely
reconsider buying your pdf versions.

2. The sans-serif font that you use interspersed with the Bookman to
indicate filenames, urls, variable names, symbols, chapter outlines,
etc. ("Avante Garde" maybe?) seems like a weird choice. It seems artsy
for artsy's-sake, and not particularly readable. Last time I saw it in
print was in the earlier editions of some Core Java books from Sun.

3. The source code font looks nice -- like Bitstream Vera Sans Mono,
which I see a lot of And clickable "download source" links -- *yow*
that's nice.

---John

 

[anne001]

Perfect timing! I bought the cookbook, and I wanted to play with one of
the programs, but did not feel like copying it. I was disappointed the
cookbook did not come with code.
thank you for posting the link. I had seen the unofficial page but had
not noticed the link to the code.

 

[Dave Thomas]

CSS can be used to format pretty much anything (within reason) in a
'custom' manner.

What would stop an author from writing a book, publishing it online
with watermarks and a EULA (or equivalent) holding purchasers
responsible for the watermarked editions of the book, and then
selecting a format for the book (font size, style, etc.) that could
be used to generate a CSS file through which the book would be
printed to .pdf (for example) and downloaded by the purchaser?

Is there a reason an author would not use such a system, were it
available? Is the retail channel so powerful, it makes such a
scheme unworkable to content creators?

There are 'civilian' versions of such, but I was thinking of 'real'
books designed for a mass audience.

We've experimented with most of the XML -> PDF direct generation
systems, and with going via HTML. Our experience is that float
placement is still a major issue, which is why we don't do it.

Our online-only books (the Fridays) are formatted wildly differently
(landscape, not portrait, larger fonts, big side margin etc), but
they come from the same markup used to created the printed books. We
have the capability to produce the different formats--we just don't
get have the solid technologies.


Dave

 

[Dave Thomas]

It's probably "just too much work". And I don't know of a CSS
solution that does really high-quality typesetting. (With XSL-FO,
that's different, but even less people know this.)

Yeah, but pure FO just doesn't hack the book stuff (and indexing is a
serious, serious hack...

One day it'll happen, and we'll try our best to be there.


Dave

 

[Dave Thomas]

Dave, I just grabbed a sample pdf (exerpt) chapter from your site and
had a look.

1. Whoa! The source code snippets are colorized! The graphics
(including the occasional screenshot) are in color too! And on Ubuntu
using Evince, the text is much more readable and clear than I'd
expected (I'd previously been using xpdf). I will definitely
reconsider buying your pdf versions.

Thanks. That was another consideration when it came to using Bookman
as the body font.

2. The sans-serif font that you use interspersed with the Bookman to
indicate filenames, urls, variable names, symbols, chapter outlines,
etc. ("Avante Garde" maybe?) seems like a weird choice. It seems artsy
for artsy's-sake, and not particularly readable. Last time I saw it in
print was in the earlier editions of some Core Java books from Sun.

Heh--you're right--good eye. It is Avant Guard. I don't love it, but
it turned out to work nicely in body text-a monospaced font is way to
wide, but the Avant Guard somehow gives the impression of being
monospaced(-ish), I think because it's fairly light. However, if you
have suggestions for a replacement I'd seriously love to hear them.


Thanks again


Dave

 

[Dave Thomas]

Heh--you're right--good eye. It is Avant Guard.

Or even Avant Garde...

 

[Daniel Martin]

1. Whoa! The source code snippets are colorized! The graphics
(including the occasional screenshot) are in color too! And on Ubuntu
using Evince, the text is much more readable and clear than I'd
expected (I'd previously been using xpdf). I will definitely
reconsider buying your pdf versions.

One thing I don't like is that the colorizer they use seems to screw
up when coloring XML - take a look at the sample chapter from "Data
Crunching", for example. It can't handle tag names that contain
dashes, apparently.

3. The source code font looks nice -- like Bitstream Vera Sans Mono,
which I see a lot of And clickable "download source" links -- *yow*
that's nice.

That being said, the font is nice and readable in paper too (I've got
my "Best of Ruby Quiz" right here). Too bad the clickable source
links just don't seem to work in the paper editions...

 

[James Edward Gray II]

Much in the tradition of Slamdance connected to the Sundance Film
Festival,
the not ready for prime time programming fellows ^1 announce the
RUBY For
The Rest Of Us Conference. RUBY ROUC

Two people have asked you nicely to spell Ruby correctly when hosting
events in its name. If you aren't going to listen to that, I guess
we know all we need to know about whether or not we should be
attending events with your name attached to them.

James Edward Gray II

 

[Robert Evans]

I think it is great that someone is going to all this effort to
organize a conference that accommodates the people who won't be able
to get into RubyConf. He seems to be meeting a demand for a service
needed by the community, in a way that also happens to involve
personal time and financial risk. If it is called RUBY ROUC, it seems
to be spelled correctly, it is just upper case.

So, is that the problem and the reason that people who post about the
case of the name don't show any appreciation that he is trying to
provide something to the community? I see no big disservice being
done to anyone by the conference name having upper case.

Is it to prevent some sort of brand dilution for Ruby? If so, any
intelligent person will know that Ruby is the name of the language
despite there being a conference called RUBY ROUC. If they can't tell
the difference, then do you really want them adopting the brand? Ruby
RUBY ruby RuBy. Why get mean about it?. Unless, of course, it impacts
the way Ruby runs on your machine. If so, we should probably just
call it ruby.

I don't want a flame war over religiously held feelings, I honestly
just don't understand the reasoning for this uncharacteristically
unfriendly behavior on this particular list which is known for its
friendliness (at least in my experience.)

Have a nice day!

Bob

 

[James Edward Gray II]

He seems to be meeting a demand for a service needed by the community,

I can't tell honestly. Sounds more like a mountain getaway that a
programming conference, but if people like that I'm glad it is an
option for them.

I see no big disservice being done to anyone by the conference name
having upper case.

I feel advertisements involving Ruby should spell the language name
correctly and with proper case. We don't want to confuse users
attending this conference or even just reading advertisements about
the event.

Clearly the conference organizer disagrees with me. Fine. I've said
my peace on the issue twice now and I know what I need to know about
the event.

Now, we just need to make sure new users lurking in this thread are
aware of the issue. Hopefully these posts have done that.

James Edward Gray II

 

[James Britt]

Is it to prevent some sort of brand dilution for Ruby?

No. I believe the intention is to prevent nubies from looking dopey
when asking questions or discussing the language. Referring to the
language as "RUBY" suggests that the speaker knows very, very little
about Ruby.

And that's fine; we all started from pretty much the same place. But
I'd be skeptical of a conference organized by someone who may know next
to nothing about the conference topic, and very skeptical of a Ruby
conference run by someone who may not be all that interested in
listening to more experienced Rubyists.


Bottom line, "RUBY" is simply wrong. It is not one of many name
variations. It is not a matter of preference. It is wrong.

 

[Robert Evans]

I just picked it up at the local bookstore yesterday afternoon, and
so far it looks really good ... and big. I checked some of the
recipes on things I already know and they seem proper, which just
boosts my confidence in it .

I like the format of the recipes. The Problem statement is really
concise, followed by a Solution section, then a Discussion of larger
issues and consequences, and sometimes a See Also section. That works
well, and in browsing so far I have found good incidental information
that way. At my stage of Ruby usage (10-11 months of full-time
development of several different projects in a commercial setting),
knowing about all the incidental cool solutions that others have
created is the next leap in productivity.

Also, in contrast to the GoF patterns format, I find this one easier
to digest. We'll see how that holds up since one of the best usages
of the GoF book was referring back to the Consequences section to
make sure that my designs using a particular pattern didn't hold any
forgotten gotchas.

Nice work on the Roman numeral recipe. That was really fun to read
because we use simple Roman numeral math as a programming interview
question.

All in all, I am looking forward to having this by my side I think it
will be very useful. Good job guys.

Bob

 

[Robert Evans]

Well put!

I see your point.

Thanks for your response,
Bob

 

[Dave Thomas]

One thing I don't like is that the colorizer they use seems to screw
up when coloring XML - take a look at the sample chapter from "Data
Crunching", for example. It can't handle tag names that contain
dashes, apparently.

Strange--it should do: I remember fixing that.

 

[Dave Thomas]

I consider FO an output format here, of course you need a toolchain to
generate it.

Oh

 

[Gus S Calabrese]

To all Ruby afficianados


RUBY ROUC is not a joke It is not affiliated with Ruby either.
I will thank anyone who bothers to check the evidence before issuing
theories about an independent conference.
I love to make things humorous which is why the conference continues
for those
who have the fortitude ( i hope the number is zero ) to meditate on
ruby until Dec 31.

You have permission to spell my name AGSC agsc Augustus gustavious
salvatore Calabrese
gus Gus or you can call me Sam although I probably won't know who you
are talking to.

Check out my resume at
http://omegadogs.com/resume/gsc_resume.htm

Note that the registration has a money back guarantee.
Why would anyone trust me to not take the money and run ?
Living in Colorado for 55 years years demonstrates my basic non-
running nature.
I will ponder further on how to reassure those Gray IIs and Britts

Sundance and Slamdance are still my best example of something similar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slamdance_Film_Festival
( except I am not competing with the Ruby conference, I am offering
additional possibilities )

AGSC

 

[Keith Fahlgren]

Yeah, but pure FO just doesn't hack the book stuff (and indexing is a
=A0 serious, serious hack...

One day it'll happen, and we'll try our best to be there.

I'll strongly disagree with this. Pure FO is more than ready to handle=20
complex technical books. If you'd like to see what it's capable of,=20
pick up a copy of Unicode Explained=20
(http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/unicode) or the forthcoming PHP=20
Cookbook 2e (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/phpckbk2) or Rails Cookbook=20
(http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/railsckbk/) [the paper, _not_ the Rough=20
Cut version], all of which were/will be produced from XSL-FO and look=20
quite good.

=46or those interested in (a lot) more, see:=20
http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/index.html.=20


PS: CSS, on the other hand, is not ready for high-quality typesetting,=20
as the others have said.

HTH,
Keith

 

[Hal Fulton]

To all Ruby afficianados


RUBY ROUC is not a joke It is not affiliated with Ruby either.

If RUBY isn't Ruby, what does it refer to? And why are you posting
about RUBY to a Ruby mailing list?


Hal

 

[Gregory Brown]

Check out my resume at
http://omegadogs.com/resume/gsc_resume.htm

Gus really likes to hammer I guess:

"Hammering!!!!! (H+)"